BBC's world to expand in Asia Pacific

Kirsty Simpson

BBC World News is expanding into the Asia Pacific, doubling its staff in Singapore and launching a new Singapore-London co-hosted news show.

The BBC's director of global news, Peter Horrocks, said the broadcaster was expanding general news coverage in the region, increasing editorial staff from eight to 15, and appointing a senior business correspondent for East Asia.

''The Asia-Pacific is the growth area,'' he told BusinessDay during a conference on public broadcasting in Brisbane this week.

''We have invested in a program called Newsday co-hosted from Singapore and London for the early and mid-morning Asian and Australian market.''

Mr Horrocks nominated citizen journalism as the biggest change to the profession since he started at the BBC as a trainee 30 years ago.

Rather than reducing the need for professional journalism, Mr Horrocks said the torrent of information actually underscored the need for the industry to apply professional standards to that flood of data and opinion. But speed was also of the essence, as the BBC found during the London bombings of July 2005.

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The BBC decided to use the official fatality figures, rather than the anecdotal and sometimes exaggerated figures used by other commercial broadcasters.

But the official figures were too low and were being contradicted by the BBC's own live footage.

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The obvious disparity between what viewers were seeing and the BBC's insistence on using the official - and inaccurate - death toll ''undermined trust'', Mr Horrocks said. ''We learned from that.''

The pressures on traditional journalism business models - and the trend towards cutting back international bureaus by some broadcasters - was also a key change, and was diminishing the amount of quality independent journalism on offer, Mr Horrocks said.

''There are lots of US networks that had massive teams overseas, but have cut them back.

''So when Bin Laden was killed, a number of them were reporting his death from London.'' Mr Horrocks said the government-funded BBC had a tradition of vigorous independent journalism, but there was a risk that media investment by some other governments was leading to a different outcome.

''The Chinese, the Russians, the Iranians … they're putting their money into journalism. But it is not the kind of independent journalism that is generally well regarded in Australia and the UK. It's journalism designed to give a very particular point of view.''